Technology: Boom, Bust, and Beyond

By: Adam L. PenenbergWed Dec 19, 2007 at 8:07 AM

Battered and bankrupt alike, take heart: The dotcom crash did more than cull the investor herd; it set in motion the next great wave of innovation. But now things will only move faster--and competition will only get hotter.

In the next 10 years the fluidity of information will bring about a radically democratized society where consumers enjoy unprecedented power.

Related Content

There is another downside to the coming ubiquity of the Web: the threat to privacy will get worse before it gets better. All of this digital connectedness means that marketers can rifle through our credit files, hackers can steal our personal information, and the government can spy on us. It wasn't until George Westinghouse invented the air brake in 1868 that trains could run faster and pull hundreds of cars. Our technology-saturated society needs an analog to keep our private lives from being crushed. You leave footprints everywhere you go in cyberspace: Google conceivably knows every term you've searched for; Yahoo can store every email you've sent and received; your ISP knows who you are; and if you talk on a cell phone or send text messages from your PDA, your provider (and the FBI) can find you. You have only the illusion of anonymity.

Our representatives will be brought to a level of accountability they've never known. The ombudsman will live within us all.

Until someone picks the lock on that little problem, we'll have to cough up the Internet equivalent of protection money. (You weren't counting on the government for help, were you?) In the same way we pay extra for an unlisted phone number or caller-ID block, we'll pay companies to mask our identities online and assure our credit offline. In an imperfect world, the more our personal information gets out there and the more valuable it becomes, the more incentive there will be for companies to guard it for us. It becomes just another industry born of all this postcrash excess bandwidth.

Historian David Nye wrote, "People do not merely use electricity. Rather, the self and the electrified world have intertwined." The Internet, too, is being braided into our lives, and that will probably make us stronger--even if it leaves a few of us hanging.

Adam L. Penenberg is a journalism professor at New York University and technology columnist for Slate. Author of two books--Spooked (Perseus Publishing, 2000) and Tragic Indifference (HarperBusiness, 2003)--Penenberg was portrayed by Steve Zahn in the movie Shattered Glass.